Communication between a host device and a storage device is typically controlled by the host device's operating system using standard protocols, which include read and write commands. As part of the storage device's functionality, some storage device manufacturers provide a set of vendor-specific management tools to enable the performance of tasks, such as diagnostics and firmware upgrades, without reference to the protocol used to connect the storage device and the host device. One way to enable this “hidden” functionality in a host-device-operating-system-independent way is to write a sector containing a specific 64-byte header to the storage device, which tells the storage device that the next few reads/writes will be part of the vendor-specific management command.